Emergency alerting services are used to broadcast emergency information to mobile devices located in certain geographic areas. For example, emergency alerting services may be used to broadcast emergency weather information (e.g., tornado, flash flood, hurricane, etc.), threats against public safety, AMBER alerts, etc., to mobile devices within a geographic area. A governmental entity, such as the National Weather Service (NWS), Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), generates an alert for an area, and sends the alert to a participating service provider. An infrastructure within the provider's network then broadcasts the alert over the mobile network to subscribers in the affected area. The alerts are delivered as messages similar to text messages. Emergency alerting services in the United States are referred to as Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) or the Commercial Mobile Alert System (CMAS).
Service providers are able to broadcast commercial advertisements to mobile devices using the infrastructure for the emergency alerts. For example, instead of just sending emergency alerts over the infrastructure, a service provider may contract with a commercial entity to broadcast advertisements to mobile devices located within a certain area of the provider's network. Unfortunately, many mobile users may not want to receive commercial advertisements in this manner.